The grandfather’s story written by his grandson.. “The Guest from the Rif Mountains” narrates the harsh migration of Moroccan workers in Europe more than half a century ago

When the young Moroccan Ali arrived in Louc, the cold Belgian city whose sky was covered by the smoke of nearby coal mines, his money had almost run out, after he had paid a large amount for the taxi that took him from the train station to take him to "Al-Qassab Muhammad", the son of his country who preceded him to work. in Belgium.

Ali will not stay long in Belgium, but his great ambition will take him to the Netherlands, which he will reach in 1964, and years before the start of the organized migration of Moroccan workers to the European country, which was supervised by the Dutch government, to work in factories and in projects to rebuild the Netherlands that destroyed the World War The second is a lot of its cities.

Ali's grandson, Dutch writer Khaled Morig, recounts his late grandfather's newly released stories in a Dutch-language book called "The Guest from the Rif Mountains."

The 39-year-old writer had recorded over the years the memories of the grandfather on audio tapes, and kept them until the death of the grandfather years ago, to return to them and draw inspiration from them in his new intimate book.

Moroccan countryside

The book does not begin with Ali’s arrival in the European continent, but at first describes life in the rural mountains of Morocco, which was characterized by cruelty and lack of resources. The village in which Ali was born did not have a school, and job opportunities were very scarce, and the dream of many of the region’s youth is to emigrate To cities and countries near or far to work there to help their families in the village.

Ali was not satisfied with the surrounding circumstances, and at a very early age he started thinking about leaving the village, and he would travel to nearby Algeria for work, before he was expelled from it, and he would serve at the end of the fifties of the last century in the Spanish army, which was employing soldiers from Morocco at the time.

Although he is 28, married and has two children in his village, Ali decides to start a new journey to find work that will take him this time to the heart of Europe and will end in Holland, where he settled and brought his family there.

The writer Khaled Maurige holds a doctorate in the Berber and Arabic colloquial language for the Dutch of Moroccan origin and has translated books on Moroccan culture and history (communication sites)

Hard work and exploitation

Europe at the beginning of the sixties of the last century was not like contemporary Europe today, as it was then in the process of recovering from the wounds of World War II, and job opportunities were not available to everyone, and destitution was ravaging the poor classes in it.

The book describes Ali's transition between the strenuous manual labors he performed in his early years in Europe. Like many Moroccan immigrants, he could not stand the rigors of working in the coal mines that were widespread in Europe at the time, and left them to find other jobs.

It was not only the working conditions that exhausted workers like Ali, as they suffered from exploitation, as some factory owners at the time took advantage of their lack of knowledge of European languages, and paid them wages less than the wages of their fellow countrymen, or European immigrants from southern Europe. The rich European countries witnessed large migrations in the early 1960s from less wealthy European countries such as Italy and Spain.

The book describes the daily life of workers at that time, and how they suffered loneliness and extreme alienation, most of them did not speak the local languages ​​in Europe, and the means of communication were not available as they are today, and the original countries were very far away, and access to them required large sums of money.

Ali’s conditions will gradually improve, and he will win the love of his bosses at work, and one of the factories in which he worked will help him facilitate inviting his wife and children to live in the Netherlands, and this was not very common in the Netherlands, as he was waiting for migrant workers to return to their country after years of work, until Some factories were withholding the price of the return ticket from the workers' salaries, in order to pay it in case one of them could not pay the wages himself.

A reading of historical circumstances

Writer Khaled Moorej places his grandfather's own story in historical and social contexts. He reviews and recalls historical events in Morocco, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. He recalls, for example, the working conditions in the giant factories that existed in the Netherlands, and have almost disappeared today.

It also restores the Dutch state's relationship with immigrants, which for years has attracted great attention from Dutch politicians.

Although Ali traveled on his own to the Netherlands, he would be part of the Moroccan community in the 1960s, sometimes stigmatized by stereotypes, and he was not invested in improving her life at the time.

Parents' fatigue and children's arguments

The introduction to the book "The Guest from the Rif Mountains" draws attention to the need to understand history and read it again for the purpose of understanding the present, especially in the case of the children and grandchildren of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands, who today constitute one of the huge communities in the European country, and a constant source of controversy in the last 20 years.

The writer is surprised by the scarcity of books and studies that focus on the stories of the first Moroccan immigrants to the Netherlands, and the importance of these studies to understand and value the role played by these Moroccans in the economic renaissance that the Netherlands is witnessing today, as well as to rehabilitate a figure like Ali, the young man who worked hard all his life and established a family Big in the Netherlands.

Khaled Morig works as a professor of linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and holds a doctorate in the Berber and Arabic vernacular language for the Dutch of Moroccan origin. He has also authored and contributed to writing books on the grammar of the Amazigh language.